Lent Is Not About What You Give Up

The Great Fast, Lent, is a time of spiritual reflection. The forty days not only reflect Jesus’s journey into the desert, upon which he fasted for forty days and faced severe temptations before the start of his public ministry, but also the years which Moses and the children of Israel were said to wander between Egypt and the Promised Land. It is a time of struggle, a time of purification, and hopefully a time of spiritual enlightenment.

By how it is typically presented, when people contemplate Lent, they first think about fasting, about fasting regulations or what one has to give up, and in the process, they think Lent is about what one gives up for a limited time, without truly understanding the purpose of their actions.

The Great Fast is meant to bring everyone into an ascetic struggle, fighting against their habits and inclinations which would divert them away from God. While that struggle is meant to take place every day, and not just during special fasts on the ecclesiastical calendar, the church wisely understands that, at particular times, it is beneficial to encourage the faithful to engage a better spiritual regiment, a more intense period of struggle, where they do not have to go about their labors alone. They are to come together, struggle together, and help each other in their ongoing pilgrimage to God. After all, the spiritual journey is not merely an individualistic exercise, it is a community affair, of people in relations with each other, and so the spiritual journey with its hardships will require times when it is experienced with others in and through their community of faith.

The Great Fast, Lent, therefore is a time in which we are to learn self-control. This is not to say we have not learned it before, but, year after year, it is likely that there is more for us to learn, more depth within for us to explore, more examination to see where our weaknesses lie, and so more awareness of what we can do in order to improve our spiritual condition.

The point then is that we are to gain self-awareness. We must come to know ourselves. The Fast is not about what we give up, but what we gain: self-knowledge. Once we have come to know ourselves, we can come to know God, for in knowing ourselves, we will come to know our true relationship with God. The process certainly includes emptying ourselves of all distractions, all entanglements which would lead us astray. Fasting is a way to do this, but it is not the only way, and indeed, though the period is known as the Great Fast, fasting is only a means, and not the primary one, by which we empty ourselves from all that is false and come to know who and what we are once all the illusion we have held to is shed from us.

We are selfish. We are self-seeking. We are ignorant. We are easily led astray by our own inordinate desires. We seek after our own immediate good over the long term good, let alone the common good. The Great Fast reminds us that this way of life, this way of thinking, leads us away from the happiness which we desire. We might gain a little pleasure, but the long term effects is detrimental to ourselves and those who we love (let alone those we are called to love but do not). To know ourselves is to know our weaknesses, to know what we have made of ourselves. It is to see through all the pretense and illusion of the self we have created for ourselves to hide who we are from ourselves and for all who come to meet us. Then we can look at ourselves, our true selves, knowing who we are in God, unobscured by the defilement of sin, unattached to the illusion, undetermined by our ego. We will then see and who we are, made in the image and likeness of the God who is love. To know ourselves is to know love, to be self-giving, every rejecting all attachment to ourselves through self-denial, but not in a nihilistic self-denial which seek the destruction of what is good within us, but the self-denial which cuts through all the spiritual delusion and waste from sin and sets us free to live and breathe in the spirit of love.

Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/henrykarlson/2017/02/lent-not-give/#lUEGgED96jmI1TdS.99